Once again, I participated in the Ludum Dare game jam. I joined the “jam” category, which means I could work with a partner (@Johnicholas), and have an extra day. So, a game in 72 hours. Except, a catch: I was at a conference all day Saturday, so really more like 48 hours of active time!
We interpreted the theme of a small world in a pretty typical way, and came up with Whirled of Words, a voice-controlled element balancing game. You can play it here.
If you also participated in Ludum Dare this time around, you can make my day: leave me a comment and rate the game at the website. Thank you!
The most pleasing thing for me was how this entry tied together many of my educational efforts over the last weeks and months.
I had recently completed a JavaScript game that went pretty well, and that I did very little visual art for. I ran with that for this Ludum Dare. I had a conference to attend from 8am-5pm on Friday and Saturday, so I knew I would have less time than usual, even doing the 72-hour Jam. So choosing to stay out of Photoshop was a time-saving and energy-saving step that really worked out.
I used SVG for the first time ever (!) to do all the graphics. A few days before, I randomly spent a couple hours at the Recurse Center pairing with a batchmate who was exploring SVG for the first time. I did this without Ludum Dare in mind, but I used a lot of the orientation to SVG I got during that pairing to make the game. I used Inkscape to generate the SVG code for the sprites.
We used vanilla JavaScript to do all of the coding. Back in January when I was doing Wes Bos’s JavaScript30 course, I was inspired by the demonstration of the built-in browser support for voice recognition. I held onto that inspiration for the next Ludum Dare. This is the first time a commitment to a specific technology/technique before the theme announcement has not bitten me in the ass during the Ludum weekend. I was really pleased with the scope, complexity, and flexibility of using JavaScript and voice recognition.
As always, there are things that didn’t go as planned.
- I had hoped to do more physics animation of the SVG elements. I looked into some libraries to do this, but we ended up not having time to implement very much extra.
- Just ran out of time on UI/background polishing stuff. It is functional, but I think it could be cooler.
- We didn’t add any sound at all - this was semi-intentional, as we imagined that adding sound effects and music might interfere with the voice recognition, but I still missed doing it. Sound really adds a lot to a game!
- And finally, submitting to this particular LD was a stressful nightmare. The Ludum Dare site is still significantly under construction, and that was really unpleasant to deal with after a long day of work on the game.
But we did it! Yay LD38, another one for my memory books!